“It doesn’t fit you, you know.”

Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil. Shortly after he’d said that, he’d made me a gift of something and I’d felt trapped by it. Beer. I’d finished his beer. And because of that violation of my principles, my valuable principles, I’d made him believe that I didn’t care about him.

“I mean, sparrows are little and round and brown.”

The last conscious thing Cassidy had done in his life was to try to make me a gift of mine. “They work for the Devil,” I said, my voice breaking up like a clod of earth in water. “Excuse me.” I bolted out the back door.

By some miracle, there was no one in the town circle. I stood leaning against the big central tree, my forehead on my clenched hands, and wept again. This time the storm was silent, and angry. And this time I had to do it alone. However well I told it, no one else would understand the size of my wrongdoing or my grief. There had been a person who’d felt entitled, for the value of a swallow of beer, to deny a friend. It didn’t seem possible to share a life with that person.

The night continued to move around me, the tree continued to hold me up, the earth didn’t open under my feet. Instant oblivion wasn’t offered to me. I would just have to go on.

But I noticed, eventually, that there was an uncommon lot of verbal tiptoeing happening around me. It was Frances who was the first to be polite and self-effacing one time too many. I can’t remember her exact words; I remember that the sentence was even more ornamented and less linear than usual. I said, “I tell you what: I’ll lock myself in my room, and you can slip notes under the door. That way you can think about what you want to say for days before you say it.”

Frances’s eyes opened wide. “Hullo,” she said, grinning, “you’re back!”

Theo slid gradually into quoting from movies again, because he couldn’t help it. I understood how that worked. After all, I’d avoided seeing Theo for weeks because I couldn’t look at him and not think of VU meters and mixing boards. Sherrea simply forgot and cussed me out one day. After that, without comment, we picked up the rhythms of genuine conversation again, genuine argument, and silences that weren’t loaded with anything.

So there was no discomfort, when I went out to the stables looking for a pitchfork, in finding Sherrea propped against the fence of a nearby paddock. There was a certain amount of strangeness, however. She was feeding handfuls of clover to a camel. A two-humped, dark brown, disreputable-looking camel.

“How in the name of… everything did that get here?” I said, in lieu of the sentence I’d been planning to say.

“Isn’t she hot stuff? There’s not a thing we can do with her, but the camels keep hanging on, and they’re so weird we can’t bring ourselves to trade ’em off to somebody who needs ’em.”